The national dog show is only a couple of weeks away (all you have to do is wait a month or so), and it’s only fitting that our New York Times News Service’s epic piece on everything happening in the show fields here in the tri-state area is up on The Best-in-Show post. No other entity does highlights quite like the N.Y. Times News Service — from their Inside New York Basketball coverage to the rounds of desk booking that they’ve been doing since the late 1990s.
Which is to say, when you’re out and about in the tri-state area and you want to get a feel for what’s happening — or you’re just really hungry for dog gab — pick up a copy of The Best-in-Show.
(To be clear, The Best-in-Show is not dog house, it’s no hyperactive pup but rather a simple two-page piece that features reams of warm dog photos and quotes as well as a place for a really brief entry of some of the New York area’s best new dog trainers. For example, they just did a feature on this two guys who founded Land’s End, which makes beautiful parkally trained dogs — and you can read that piece at Yummy Puppies .)
As a more on-point example of the kind of insightful, fun nuggets found in this story, let’s go back to 2001. While the 20th anniversary of the N.Y. Times News Service was indeed a moment of record-setting triumph, it also brought with it some pretty damned outstanding second-best.
Remember that time Meg Ryan was out jogging in Central Park and stopped to have her picture taken with a group of puppies? How about the time those famous Yankee babies took a feline sanctuary in NYC?
And take a look at how much fun the 2001 episode of Modern Family had from being comprised entirely of puppies — despite its sluggish, trope-plagued first season.
Now, that’s not all: In 2017, they did an article about some lovely opportunities for New York dog lovers in Mexico, all about pet spaces! And in 2016, they reported on all the best places to visit that have spas for dogs — and there’s plenty in New York you can also do on the same topic, no?
The New York Times News Service also has a blog called Best of Times, with articles about dogs you need to know. One such headline, when searching for dog facts, hitched itself to a story on the New York Mets: “A Whisker Check! Mets Starting Pitcher Arrives Behind the Scenes.” When searching for more nuggets of fun and data, it gave the ranking of dog trainers in the U.S., including one of particular note:
“In 2009, The New York Times News Service researched 3,000 — yes, 3,000 — individual rankings and analyzed the results for each in order to produce its ‘Best of the Best’ rankings of each year’s top dog trainers.”
There’s a lot more than these Top 10 lists — but it’s enough to whet the appetite for some dog chatter in the dog house.
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